“inspiration”
82 posts under this tag.
It’s because they’re so bad.
Some days ago I bought my first mangaWP on a whim (Kare KanoWP, IH and FurubaWP, IH). I couldn’t believe my eyes reading them. They were so bad, so unlike any other comic I had seen.
They were black and white, with extremely simple, sketchy, cartoonish drawing—much of it seemingly left undone, symbols almost. Text was everywhere, sometimes in sketchy balloons, often not, often pointing (pointing!) cutely at things in tiny, jokey blurbs. Personal, painfully amateurish messages from the author were interspersed along the text (“As I’m writing this, I’ve been cutting my hand on the paper a lot.”). There were patterns instead of scenery, when there was any scenery at all. Long shots took entire panels, empty and mood-setting. Panels felt like paragraphs instead of pigeonholes and drawings flowed in and out of them, below and atop. By far, most panels were filled with people interacting, their faces and expressions. Closeups were everywhere. Everything was just so loose, so personal, so free, so bad.
“I’ve always accepted my groggy mornings because they come with my glorious nights.”
anglo latin; the origin of latin america as a word; my high school wasn’t bilingual, it was English with Spanish as a second language; I always say math and language are the same ability because they’re the same thing, math is just specialized talk about numbers; but then zoology is just talk about animals…; the difference is that math is, in a farly unparalleled way, advanced through language itself (as opposed to, say, zoology, which, advances chiefly through observation); the way forward in language is through logic; logic is syntax; understanding is synthesizing and paraphrasing; {an algorithm just like flooding to create a machine that understood, as previously defined—one wouldn’t even need to define what a word is}; Wikipedia syntax highlighting!
Glorious, thought-drunken night.
We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form —perhaps the art form of the next century.
Steven Johnson, Interace Culture, p213
“Hello, how are you?” being written in Dasher. (Hit escape to halt animation.)
A text-entry interface for the tetraplegic, it’s like nothing you’ve seen. Not only does using it have the same rush and exhilaration of playing SonicWP, it is also unbelievably efficient. And again, sheer fun.
It will take you some 5 minutes to get the hang of it (not out of difficulty, out of profound weirdness) but believe you me, you won’t regret it. Read the quick, 3-page explanation and try the Java version in-browser or download it. It’s free software and there are localized versions in many languages.
If such deep novelty, such striking unrealityELZR lies in something as mundane as text-entry, what wonders lie yon in the craft of interface design?
Scratch
Visual programming has been a perennial pipe dream of mine and just some three months ago the MIT Media Lab unveiled the best embodiment so far of my vague and unspecified dreams. It’s called Scratch and it’s meant to introduce children to computing by giving them easy, programmatic means to media manipulation.
The brilliant breakthrough has been to Lego-fy programming, making control blocks actually, well, blocks, and turning programming into block stacking. Yes, it’s messy and you have to fumble around for blocks but it’s visual, incredibly intuitive, and—get this—syntax error free (since blocks have shapes and will only fit in ways that make syntactic sense).
It was scary, you know, when I first knew about Scratch, just some days after it was launched, my evangelizing streak came back with a vengeance and I felt this strange calling to go and teach it somewhere, wherever. Here was finally an easy way to show “normal” people what programming was. Here it is.
Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchismWP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.
Timothy C. May’s WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collectionAM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)
Crypto anarchy is the cyber spatial realization of anarcho-capitalism, transcending national boundaries and freeing individuals to consensually make the economic arrangements they wish to make..
[It] ensures that men with guns cannot be brought in to interfere with mutually agreed-upon transactions, the only kind of economics interaction possible in crypto anarchy. Some people will of course scream “Unfair!” and demand government intervention, which is why strong cryptography will probably be opposed by the masses, unless of course, they are wise and take the long view. This may smack of elitism, but I have very little faith in democracy. De Tocqueville warned in 1840 that, roughly translated, “The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.” We reached that point several decades ago..
To put it bluntly, crypto anarchy basically undermines democracy: it removes behaviors and transactions from the purview of the mob. And once crypto is deeply entwined into the fabric of life and commerce, it will be too late to pull the plug.
Timothy C. May, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy
Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.
.., one of the world’s largest and most influential private-equityWP firms, is planning an IPO of a minority stake, “perhaps 10%.” Appraisals of the company’s total value range “from $20 billion to double that.”
It has some 750 employees.
Talk about leverage.
Maybe the insolent goal is possible after all.
The recent (April 16) revamping of TED.com around their famous talks provides the perfect excuse for me to finally write about them. And what I want to say boils down to one thing: watch them. They’re free. They’re one of the most exciting things content-wise to happen to the web of late. They have a cumulative effect. The audio and video quality are superb. They are raw, distilled passion. Their speakers are truly among the world’s most talented, most inspiring people (passion begets passion).
And if you only have time for one talk, let it be Eva Vertes’s—probably the best video I’ve seen, ever. Not only does she (very convincingly) puts forth a fascinating (and, oddly, satisfying) theory of cancer in less than 19 minutes, making it all seem as the simplest, most logical thing in the world, she also does it with a naive, youthful spunk that disarms you right away. I swear if I had seen this in high school I might have thrown it all away and study medicine. She’s that good. Now I’ll settle to try to convince my brilliant med-studying sister to tackle cancer. She too is that good.
Also not to be missed are…
Mi kredas je la Bono. Kaj, male al multaj homoj, mi kredas, ke Bono tute ne simetrias kun Malbono, sed ege superas ĝin. Malbone konstruita domo disfalas. Bone konstruita rezistas al la atakoj, eĉ plej teruraj, de naturaj fortoj.
I believe in Good. And, as opposed to many people, I believe that Good is not at all symmetric to Evil, but surpasses it by far. A badly build house falls down. A well built one resits the attacks, even the most terrible, of natural forces.
I’ve treasured this quote since I read it and the crucial semantic confusion—good as in righteous; good as in quality, as in utility—that lies at its heart, the one that English’s irregularity obscures, has never failed to cheer me up. For it’s a confusion I happily share.
What is courage? Courage is what it takes to overcome fearELZR.
By describing how my own failures of courage feel to me, I hope to help you recognize such failures in yourselves. I seek to encourage you. I mean that literally. I seek to extend your courage by making you aware of your need for it and by describing some symptoms of its failure. I will offer some ways to reduce your need for courage, to marshal what courage you can muster, and to husband your store of it.
I don’t even remember how it was that last Thursday morning I ended up reading Sutherland’s classic article. But I’m glad I did. It was exactly what I needed. Thank you Mr Sutherland.
Never had read anything by Larry WallWP before. I’m dazzled, through and through. Don’t walk, run out to read his Perl, the first postmodern computer language speech. It’s an important rambling, with a scope far beyond that of programming.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to computer science, [My daughter] went on, “Well, it’s like, you know, we have this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we say: ’Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: ‘Tsall good.’’’
“But you don’t actually think everything is good, do you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?”
”No, Dad, I think when we say that, we’re saying that, overall, things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don’t just focus in on the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.”
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are cute and smart, but also because I think it’s important that we know where our culture is going, and because it’s our kids that will shape our culture in the future. I don’t think I could have defined postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don’t focus in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep everything in context. Don’t go out of your way to justify stuff that’s obviously cool. Don’t ridicule ideas merely because they’re not the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don’t let someone else tell you what you should like. ’Tsall good.
That’s all well and good, but I ask you, if it’s all good, why, in every other breath, does my daughter say “That sucks.”?
It has taken me some three years to realize it but when I did it was obvious. The crazy sleep schedule I’ve been riding since I dropped out of college is more than the pale-hacker tropism for long quiet nights. It’s more than manic-depression, which for a time I was sure of having. It’s more than youthful immaturity, which I’m sure of having.
I remember the first nights out from college, and some before, I would curl up on my bed, scared as I’ve ever been—fingers curled, fetal, with hamsters in my head and a stomach full of nothing, churning away anyway. Scared of what you say? Oh, the usual I guess, scared of failure, of success, of not being up to the challenge, of blowing it all away in search of some silly dream. Mostly, though, scared of this fear I knew not inside of me.
Those nights stopped without my realizing but I now know what happened to them: I tired them away. I would work (or idle) my way to exhaustion, till there was nothing left for me to do but tumble down. Sleeping was sure easier than facing my fears, and since everything could wait, what was the harm of sleeping on it? Again and again.
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